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Prejudiced
By dion | February 16, 2008
Hilts is excited about Persuasion. I am too. I reckon it vies with Pride and Prejudice as my favourite Jane Austen novel, which is saying something, because I love Pride and Prejudice. I have a problem trusting people who dislike Jane Austen wholesale, to be honest - I just can’t work out why and immediately suspect they haven’t actually read Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. Charlotte Brontë didn’t like Jane Austen’s writing much; I think her objection ran along the line of her characters being ‘more real than true’. I love Jane Eyre more than almost any other pile of words, so it pains me to reconcile such a dinky comment with such a mammoth author. There was plenty of truth in Austen’s characters, particularly in Persuasion - and not to be snarky about it, but Louisa Musgrove alone has more ‘truth’ in her than all of Charlotte Brontë’s secondary characters put together.
The 1995 version of Persuasion is the only film version of a Jane Austen novel that I like, and it, along with the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with Jennier Ehle, is the only film version of an Austen novel I’ve seen that hasn’t made me want to spit nails. To be fair, I’ve stopped watching them. Two of them pissed me off irretrievably - the Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and the Pride and Prejudice with the skinny chick from the pirate movies. Those two punked out at the emotional climaxes so pukably. Eleanour is not the sort of woman who’s going to burst out in tears in front of her lover. Making her do that to prove a point about sense and sensibility being best as a delicate balance is as fucking laboured as a Kevin Smith movie. And Darcy and Elizabeth traipsing around in the dewy fields in their pyjamas to wind up Pride and Prejudice! Holy fuck.
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The worst thing about that Pride and Prejudice, though, is how it turned the spat after Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth into the equivalent of two teenagers whining at each other, for no reason that I can accept. Austen’s dialogue for that spat is concise and some of her best, and the filmmakers wouldn’t have wasted any time using it instead of using the made-up adolescent shit talk they replaced it with. What’s more, it’s what the rest of the novel hangs on; the idea that Elizabeth can point out to Darcy that his behaviour hasn’t been gentlemanly in such a way that he’s going to spend the rest of the book realizing she’s right, feeling bad, and trying to be more gentlemanly. And so get her to fall in love with him; with the help of his gorgeous estate and fabulous wealth of course, ladies being only human. But take that away - as the film makers did - and all you’ve got left is an unexceptional shitty Hollywood romance that isn’t worth suspending your disbelief for because there aren’t any knobs in it.
Anyways. That wasn’t what I meant to go on about. This is the problem with blogging before work - one goes off an a tangent and realizes one hasn’t mentioned how great the documentaries of Adam Curtis are and how you can find some of them streamed online, and that there isn’t time to go back and change anything - sigh. But I would like to mention that the F-word and I got back together when I was 27, and a spinster in that I had decided that extended romantic relationships were for the naïve, poor, or those without hobbies. It gives me a new feeling for Anne Elliott of Persuasion, which is cool, since previously the fictional chick I’d identified the most with was Rochester’s crazy wife.
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